


The Mist Lords

by Amaritzi



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Gen, Max comes back- eventually, Max runs away, Post-Mad Max: Fury Road, Prostitution, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-04-13 19:55:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4535256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amaritzi/pseuds/Amaritzi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max runs as far away from Furiosa and he can get, even though he's learnt by now: escaping one kind of trouble usually leads you straight into another.</p><p>Max ends up hiding in a brothel in a hidden trade town ruled over by a clan of warrior war lords who have learnt how to harvest mist.</p><p>aka:</p><p>Max is so broken, it takes a whole frikken bordello to put him back together again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It’s three dried dates that save Max.

Given without thinking.  
Food he has left over from the war rig rations that he shares with a boy for a reason he can’t quite place.

A tiny oasis town that Max would have avoided usually; that he’s forced to walk into because there is no-where else to get more fuel.

Fifty three days of driving as fast as he could to get away from … that knowing, that recognition in Furiosa’s eyes, the soft touches of the wives, the kindness that leaked out of those women and under his skin to wake up everything he thought he’d killed and buried long ago.

Fifty three days until he is forced to hide his stolen piece of shit car in the mountains and head off to find more fuel so he can keep on moving, although a small and snarky part of him says it will never be far away enough. He’s stuck now, the weight of those women in the citadel like a fluttering black veil hanging in the sky that he’s gonna be outrunning until he grinds his mind with enough desert sand to erase them.

 

He comes across the town by accident, a small spark of light on the edge of the night that he wouldn’t have seen otherwise if he wasn’t looking for that fucking satellite that he now watches for each night, almost wishing the women were that far away from him; a distance that he would be infinitely more comfortable with.

He puts a stone in line with the yellow dot on the horizon, falls back to sleep. Wakes at dawn the next morning and starts walking.

 

The town is deep in the mountains, down a steep valley. Worn grey rocks everywhere and then suddenly a splash of murky green.

When he gets close enough it turns into trees, twisted and bent and old, old, old, covered in dust, but still growing.  
And a ramshackle sprawl of houses built in between the rocks and trees.

Scrubby bushes and grasses growing low to the ground. Everything clutching as hard and tight as it can to the thin layer of fertile earth.

 

A trading town, hard men loading up a train of camels, bandoleers of bullets across their chests, wiry men watching them like hawks, townspeople hurrying around them, skinny mutts ranging the streets with their noses to the ground.

He circles around warily, slowly, trying to conserve as much energy as he can in case he needs to run.

Set around the edge of the town are wide grey/green nets of flimsy material that has been mended so many times it is hard to know what it originally looked like.  
He thinks initially they must be a disguise of some sort, which they are, cleverly ranged about so that no buildings can be seen from afar. Max stands studying a net for a long time in admiration until his nose figures out their main purpose.

The finest scent of something cool and dark and fresh in amidst the smell of dust and camels on the breeze and he stands still until he finds where it is coming from.  
A clay vessel nestled into the rocks, a thin metal tube running to it, hooked to a funnel stitched along the bottom of the net.

The clay pot, when he lifts it, sloshing with a third of clean water that he pours carefully into his battered canteen and then even more carefully into his mouth, savouring each of the four mouthfuls he allows himself. Dusty, flinty, wet and cool.

Something crawls out of the mess of his brain, a conversation with a man in a bar somewhere. If the cold mist comes up at night sometimes you can catch it. Mist nets.

 

He walks into town in the evening. Having scouted out things from a distance. Choosing a cantina with walls of welded metal that rises upwards into the trees and backwards in a messy sprawl. Soft light glowing from the rooms above. Drunken noise spilling out into the murky darkness. The outskirts of town. Ragged men going in and out on occasion. None of the robed men. Nothing that looks like anything remotely important going on.

 

Inside the smoky scent of oil lamps and male sweat and cheap perfume, spilt beer, some kind of smoke in the air.. tobacco? Something cooking that smells infinitely edible.

Max takes a seat in a corner alcove, stowing his pack beneath his legs, and a tired woman comes over and plonks a mug of bitter beer down in front of him. She cocks her head at him questioningly and he stares down at his hands until she walks away.

 

He sniffs the beer and then drinks it slowly, watching the people around him. Drunk men groping gaudily dressed women who twist evasively around them. In the corner an old man playing some kind of thumb piano, the notes rising high and sharp above the raucous jagged noise.

Max shakes his head at the women that come to proposition him. Each more stylish than the next. They remind him too much of the wives, the soft curves of their bodies on display, backs straight and defensive, eyes hard and shuttered, a grim tightness at the corners of their mouths.

 

After a while an old woman brings him a bowl of stew and another mug of beer and sits across from him, sizing him up, they sit there staring at each other.  
The woman white haired, wrinkled, hard as one of the twisted trees outside.

‘What you want here?’

‘Fuel,  
   

food,

water...’

 

‘No women?’

He lifts a shoulder, shrugs. It’s been so long he is not sure he would know what to do with one.

 

‘A room for the night?’

He nods. And the woman stares at him expectantly until he digs around in his pockets, the contents of which he has been mentally cataloguing since the first sip of beer.

 

He stares across at her, trying to match the things he has with the one thing she might want.

Her fingers are bare, her dress a plain navy blue, her hair pulled back tight against her skull and her eyes boring into him like a driller.

He hums, reaches into his inside pocket, finds what he needs without taking anything else out. Holds it in his palm, keeping his fist closed until she lays her hand underneath and he can drop the tiny bundle into her cupped hand.

She unrolls the strip of fabric on her lap, out of sight. Four sharp needles. Solid steel, serviceable, strong enough to stitch leather. She looks at him sharply,

‘A tailor eh..?’ grinning like a harpy at her own joke.

He lifts his shoulder again, picks up his spoon and points to the stew. He’ll eat anything except human, doesn’t need any more ghosts.

‘Pig’, and she grins again as she gets up.

‘I’ll send a lad to take you to your room, let him know if you want company there’ and he is still staring down into the bowl, doesn’t even remember how many years ago he last tasted pork. It almost tastes wrong in his mouth, like a trap. A spiced richness he has forgotten.

 

By the time he has finished a small boy comes to stands beside the table, waiting until Max realises he should follow. The boy leads him out of the room, down twisting corridors and up a flight of stairs, past a man pushing a woman into a wall, one of her legs held up around his waist.

The woman opens her eyes when they pass, still moaning in faked ecstasy, she smiles at the boy, glares at Max, who puts up his hands silently, makes his way carefully around them, twisting his body so that it doesn’t touch them in the narrow space, stepping over a leather shoe.

  
The toes of her bare foot are pointed. Her long dark hair a tangled mess. Her eyes are so brilliantly green Max finds himself staring in confusion.

She flaps her hand at him in a dismissive motion, groans louder, pointedly glaring at him over the large shoulders and he turns and stumbles into the boy who is patiently waiting.

 

They go up more stairs to the next floor and down a long corridor to a corner room. The boy shoves open the door and steps into the darkness, the rasp of a match and Max sees him bending down to the oil lamp, turning the wick down, his eyes huge in his thin face.

‘You want someone to come?’

Max shakes his head, falls down onto the mattress in the corner.

‘You wanna wash?’

Max thinks, nods and the boy disappears, comes back ten minutes later with a tin bucket and a basin. The water steaming hot.

 

Max stares at it in wonder and the boy crosses to the wooden shelves and brings back a small worn towel and a dish with a knob of soap in it and places them on the stool beside the bed.

‘..the fuck, kid?’

Max hasn’t seen anything resembling soap in thousands of days, hasn’t washed in warm water for so long he has forgotten that such a practice exists.

 

The boy grins shyly and turns to leave and Max stops him with a grunt, digs into his pack and finds the dates, holds them out until the surprised boy takes them.

‘thanks kid’, and the boy’s smile is like a sliver of moonlight in the gloomy room. He thumps his chest with a skinny hand: ‘Knife’, and Max nods, giving no name in return. The boy spins around into the corridor, pushing the dates carefully into his pocket, closing the door with a quiet click behind him.

 

Max bolts the door and then makes his way with the lamp held high, carefully checking the room for weak points. The windows are barred and narrow, looking out into the tree canopy, but with no branches near enough to worry about. The walls are solid wood, with no hidden spy holes. He sits on the stool and unbuckles his brace, placing it near the bed in case he needs to run in the night.

Then he undresses and stands naked in that place of presumed safety and washes down his body. It has been so long since he’s done that that it feels like a new thing, each scar coming almost as a surprise. The sight of his pale, naked legs as strange as meeting a new animal in the wastelands.

When he’s done he washes his clothes in the murky water and hangs them in the window to dry and then he lies down on the mattress, trying not to breath in the smell of old sex and sweat and he sleeps in a bed for the first time that decade.

He dreams of the wives, of Furiosa wrapped in her blanket in the desert, vulnerable and strong at the same time. In the dream she is asking him questions and he doesn’t know the answer to anything so he keeps quiet and she gets more and more angry and when he wakes at last it is with relief. He watches the half moon move across the sky, the dark silhouettes of branches, listens to the sounds around him. A woman screaming in faked passion, a man crying out in the darkness below, a crowd singing drunken drinking songs that he can’t quite hear the words to.

He doesn’t want to sleep again but he knows he needs to rest while he can.

He closes his eyes and starts to strip and rebuild the engine of the car he has lost. Knowing each part of it so intimately he can recreate it from scratch in his mind.  
He pulls it apart, put it back together, and does it two more times before he finally passes out.

Just before he goes under he remembers the name of the thing he was looking for.

Jade.

The woman’s eyes like the glowing green jade tiger on his mother’s dressing table.

And he curses her in his mind because it has taken decades to force himself to forget he ever had a mother, or a father that would bring a mother home such a thing.

That there was once a world where a man would bring a woman home something delicate and unnecessary. Something else besides a need. Something else besides his cock and his gut and his fists.

Or maybe it's even worse that that. 

Maybe it's the vast and untranslatable chasm between this world and a world where people wanted something as useless as a dressing table.  
And how there was no road that would ever lead back there.


	2. Chapter 2

In the morning Knife wakes him with a soft knock on his door. He opens it a crack, looks down at the mussed tousle of black hair and loosens his grip on the gun held behind his naked back.

The boy smiles hesitantly.

'You want food or compny or both?'  
Reciting it in a practiced rush.

Max is curious and faintly amused:

'What can I afford?'

'Food and a lil bitta compny...' 

'How much is a bitta?'

And the kid launches into what Max realises too late is a coded list of sexual favours: 

... a jizza, a wizza, a sticky one, a sisters, a 180.. 

And Max blurts out a surprised laugh, putting his hand out to stop him,  
'food kid, jus food', closing his door and dressing with an unusual lightness he hasn't felt in a long time. 

The harpy must have really liked those needles. 

Knife returns with a huge bowl of lumpy but tasty gruel and a mug of something Max thought he'd never taste again. 

Coffee. Actual real as fuck coffee.

Not something pretend made out of ground up roots or bark.

Dark, bitter coffee that Max sips as slowly as he can. Standing out of sight and looking down through the window at the few people walking below. 

A few tradesmen moving goods, a baker with a tray of bread, some children leading camels, a man with half a pig carcass balanced across his shoulders.

And every so often the hard men dressed in flowing black robes with the silver glint of knives hanging from their belts. Their dark hair worn long and plaited. A tattooed band of black across their faces at eye level. Their walk loose and springy, bodies honed and ready as snakes about to strike.

Later he gets Knife to lead him to the guzzoline dealer. A wiry old man worn down to sinew who sizes him up with a long stare.

'Where you from boy?'

'Wasteland'.  
A place with no fixed boundaries that covers thousands of possible clans and origins. 

The dealer looks him up and down in a way that lets Max know he knows he's talking shit. 

Max glares at a spot on the floor, rusted brown, maybe blood, maybe oil. He has learnt exactly how to cover his tracks.

'M gonna need to see some steel from you, Sonny'.

Max takes out the knife he scavenged from a fallen war boy. Solid steel and sharp as a razor. He'll miss it, but he has its big brother tucked into his boot.

The old man snorts into his chest, runs his fingers over the blade.

'Come back in three days boy and I'll have it ready'.

Max heads off to find supplies. Trades various small motor parts he doesn't need until he's filled his sack with dried fruit, dried meat and hard tack biscuits. Enough to last a few more months. 

When he gets back to the cantina he slips through the back door near the kitchen. Knife is curled asleep in a sagging chair near the stove. The cook raises an eyebrow, sizes him up and down, nods him through upstairs and turns back to hacking a slab of meat apart with an axe. 

Max dozes until evening, cool breeze raking his back. He doesn't quite know what to do with this unexpected peace, keeps waiting for the quiet to shatter. 

He goes hesitantly downstairs when night falls. The harpy seats him in the same alcove they were in before. She asks him if he wants a woman? A man? Both? Two women? and he answers her each time with a shake of his head. 

'Dinner..coffee..that's it.'

He's going to pour as much of that stuff into his face as he can. 

'Ok Tailor man, suit yourself..'

Her shit eating grin as she leaves reminds him a little of the keeper of seeds.

Knife brings his meal to him, takes his empty bowl and mug away when he's done and brings him a glass of something sharp and sweet with a kick like a boot to the throat. 

He laughs at Max's face when he tastes it and places a saucer of roasted nuts and slices of lemon in front of the glass.

'Drink, eat one, drink, eat the other one...' Nodding encouragingly

And Max finds he is right, somehow the drink stops kicking enough to be palatable.

He is drunker than he's been in ages when he heads outside, wanting to scope out the town. He wanders around, sticking to the shadows, watching the stars, winding his way back when his head stars pounding a little.

The robed men appear suddenly on either side of him, hands on the long knives in their belts. 

'How you get here, friend?'

Max shrugs, non-comittal, rumbling and pretending to be drunker than he is. 

The men take his arms, marching him deeper into the shadows. 

Their questions make no sense, the words disjointed. He keeps shaking his head and the taller one pushes him up against a tree and puts an arm across his neck.

'What colour is the star that brought morning?'

And he realises far too late...

 

It's a code, a fucking password code, and he's been a walking deadman since he strolled into town.


	3. Chapter 3

Through the haze of blood and pain and anger Max has to admit a reluctant admiration to the way the men are beating him.  
Working him over with smooth and efficient movements, spinning in sinewed circles so that their bodies flow like some kind of strange and terrible dancing.

A kick to his head, a double handed punch to his sternum, both of them calmly cracking elbows into his sides as he falls to the ground.

Each time he comes up roaring like a bull, hitting any piece of them he can find, and each time they beat him back with another round of pain.

A blooded ballet. His body nothing but a dance floor.

His mouth is filled with dirt and leaves and blood, so much blood. And they flip him over, twin smiles greasy and sharp in the moonlight.

'Oh we're gonna have so much fun with you before we let you die....'  
The taller one, his long dark plait wound like a snake around his neck.

Max spits out blood before he can choke on it.  
Lies back on the ground.  
Can feel his world stuttering, his eyes rolling back, and he wishes suddenly that Furiosa was there: just to see their last double flying kick to his chest.  
The one that has stolen all of his breath and broken at least four ribs.

Even she'd have to admit they had style.

 

When he wakes again he is tied up in a dank room that smells like camels. One side of his body stuck to the matted straw floor with his crusted blood.

He turns onto his back and immediately regrets it when every single part of his body screams in pain.  
His bound hands are tied so tightly he can't feel them anymore.  
It's only the feel of them crushed under his spine that lets him know they haven't been cut off.

 

He rolls back onto his side. Breathes in musty straw as shallowly as possible. Each breath hitching like daggers past his broken ribs.

In the next room he can hear the sound and shuffle of animals, the snort of camels that he remembers from a time long, long ago. 

 

His feet are tied as tightly as his hands and the only thing he can do is roll. He's made it all the way to the door when it opens quietly. He's about to smash his feet into the figure standing there when he realises how small it is and he goes still, waiting with his legs folded like a spring.

He breathes out a shaky breath when Knife slips into the room like a piece of shadow.

The boy feels over his body with gentle hands. Skimming over the slicked blood and rope. He pats Max's chest softly. Slips out again. Comes back some time later with a looming silhouette of a man who lifts Max unceremoniously over his shoulder like a slab of meat. The boy clapping his hand over Max's mouth at the sound he makes when his broken ribs rub together. 

They walk very slowly and silently through the darkness, skirting the town. Max can see only the back of the man, the ground below and he clenches his jaw, closes his eyes, trying to think of anything except the pain that each step brings.  
By the time they reach the cantina he has passed out four times, each time bringing blessed relief.

 

He wakes again when the man flops him down backwards onto a bed and stands there silently running his eyes over Max's body.

The cook. His clothes stained now with Max's blood.  
He shakes his head. 'Fekking eejit....' And turns to leave just as Knife comes into the room with the harpy following. 

She sits down on the bed and begins to feel over his body, pushing and prodding.

'Tailor man, you are well and truly fucked m'lad...'

He grins wryly through the blood. It's a scenario he's pretty intimately acquainted with.

 

He lies back on the bed and tries to figure out where he is. In a four poster bed in a small room filled with silken wall hangings.  
A soft and strange space. A row of dresses hanging from a rail. A tin bath with a high back. A small shelf of books tacked onto the wall.  
A woman's room. Somewhere in the brothel.

The harpy gives up trying to get his shirt off and starts to cut the cloth off Max's body.  
She turns to Knife who is hovering at her side: 

'You gotta go back over the way you came boy, make sure they can't see any blood. A few drops leading this way and we're finished. 

Take a hooded lamp and crawl. Over and over, make sure no-one sees you. 

Wait till the sun starts to come up and go over the trail again to be sure'. 

 

The boy scurries off and the Harpy runs her hands down his sides, feeling the broken bones out of place. Looks up at him with her shit-eating grin. 

'I should keep you awake for this part, you deserve it....'

'Yesss'. His word hisses out as she presses again for emphasis.

She looks at him for a long moment. Not hiding her anger. Then she rustles in her apron and brings up a small glass bottle, tipping a few drops onto a cloth that she brings up to cover his nose and mouth. 

'Breathe in deep, Tailor.  
Sweet dreams.......'

And he does. Her wrinkled face merging with the silk hanging behind her as his world slides into blackness.


	4. Chapter 4

Max has only fragments from the next few days and they blur into one another so that he isn't sure which is real and which is dream and which is ghosts.

 

There is pain and more pain and the harpy's grimace as she re-cleans the cuts on his face and his arms. 

His ghosts come crowding into the room, lurking in the ceiling corners, looming so close he can feel himself suffocating.

The cook comes in every so often to haul him off to the toilet down the corridor, huge arms holding him up around the shoulders as he stumbles, closing the door and leaving Max to deal with things himself, then hauling him back with an impartial practicality. Almost amused as he passes out afterwards from the pain.

 

And then one evening he wakes to find Knife patting his shoulder, that same soft tap from the stable, holding out a bowl of soup. 

Max sips it slowly, unable to sit up properly.  
It takes so long to finish the boy falls asleep curled at his feet and Max collapses back exhausted, too weak to even stretch to place the bowl on the table beside the bed.

He dreams of the Dag, giving birth to a beautiful child that he somehow knows is Joe in disguise. Joe reborn.  
Joe that can never be killed, no matter how many times they try.

'That's what Immortan means', he's trying to tell Furiosa.  
But she has the child cradled in her arms, the metal hand curled protectively around its head, and although he is shouting she cannot hear him.

He jerks awake and Knife is there, huddled in a corner, trembling.  
The bowl is in shattered pieces on the floor.

The boy shakes his head, rushes out of the room, and the taste of ghost in the air tells Max he has been screaming in his sleep.

 

The harpy comes bustling into the room. Stands watching him for a few minutes with her hands on her hips.  
Then she sighs and brings the small bottle up out of her apron:

'You can't scream like that here lad. This is the woman's sleeping section. No men allowed'. 

Bringing the cloth to his face with a grimace.

 

When he wakes again it is to the smell of scented steam.

There is a woman in the tin bath. Her back to him. Dark hair piled up in a knot on the top of her head.  
She washes her arms, her chest, washes each long leg, washes her feet, businesslike, rubbing the wet cloth around each toe. Then she lies back in the water and sighs. 

Max dozes off and wakes again with the noise of her standing as she steps out of the bath.  
The water falling off her body in a rush, tinted copper in the lamp light.

She is tall, thin flanked, her limbs loose and poised. A body honed down to its pure self.

Across her shoulder blades a tattooed bird, wings outstretched in flight. A line of cursive text running down her spine that twists as she reaches for a drying cloth.

Max closes his eyes, knows somehow this is something he isn't supposed to see. 

A woman naked, unpaid for, forbidden.  
But the wings especially.  
Secret wings on something caged. 

Just as he would hate anyone to see the tattoo that covers his back.  
That he seriously hopes the harpy hasn't seen. The fact that he isn't muzzled makes him think she couldn't have.

His eyes are still squeezed shut when he hears her blow out the lamp in a huff.  
Then he feels the bed dip beside him and he can smell the woman as she climbs under the covers, fresh soap and something musky and floral and human. 

When he risks looking again he can see only the shape of her back turned towards him. The moonlight coming in through the high windows too faint to see anything besides different shades of black and grey.

He doesn't know what to do. Would get out of the bed if he could walk. The drug lingering in his body makes that even more impossible.

He lies there in the darkness trying to breath as evenly as he can and when her breathing changes into sleep he edges as far away from her as he can until he is resting right against the wall.

He wants to give her as much space as he can if he starts flailing in his sleep. 

When he wakes in the morning she is gone and Knife is there with breakfast. Dark purple bruising on his cheek that makes Max grimace and grit his teeth in disgust.

'Sorry kid'. 

Knife nods quickly, a small, tight smile that flutters and is gone.

'Not your fault'.  
The generosity in it cuts straight into his chest.  
This boy that crawled through the darkness how many times to cover up his blood.

Knife comes back later in the day with two bowls of stew for lunch. He eats his sitting on the bed, leaning against one of the bedposts, staring at Max like he is a strange new pet.

It makes him more than uncomfortable. Makes him feel like running if he could run.

'N you bring me one of those books, kid?' Max gestures at the shelf vaguely. Mostly to distract the boy, to move his attention. 

'You can read?'

'hmm'. A slow nod.

The boy moves a chair under the shelf so he can reach, comes back with as many books as he can carry, then scrambles up the bed until he is sitting beside Max, almost vibrating with eagerness.

Max sorts through the books.  
So old many of them are falling apart, their leather covers cracked with age. Pages stitched back in with different coloured thread.

He glares over at the expectant boy, raises an eyebrow in question.

'Jus wanna see how it happens...  
reading. Only three people here can read and they are always too busy...'

Max is pretty sure he knows what kinds of things keep them away from reading.

 

He glares at the boy, glares at the bruise on his face, sighs theatrically, holds up two books reluctantly.

'We got Alice in fucking Wonderland...... (red cover so worn the embossed picture isn't discernible anymore). 

...or the fucking Jungle Book' (Re-covered in hideous brown leather that has to come from some kind of reptile, the pages bound into it with thin wire).

The two most child friendly books he can see.  
He doubts the kid wants to hear about 'The history of Britain and her islands' or 'Scottish country dance styles'.

'The Fucking Jungle Book', the kids eyes are wide with humour and excitement.

'Jus so you know, there is no fucking...' Max growls out, glaring at the kid in mock anger.

'What a relief', the boy is straight faced, and Max hides his smile in his chest as he opens the book.

 

His voice is dusty and hesitant with disuse and the sentences are halting and strange on his tongue.  
The boy is radiant with happiness, not giving a damn how long it takes Max to get the words out of his mouth.

It takes so long to read just the first chapter, that by the time he is done the boy is asleep beside him.  
Max closes the book, exhausted and falls asleep to dreams of animals long since gone from this world.


	5. Chapter 5

Max jolts awake when the door opens and for once it isn't the harpy and it isn't the cook.

It's the woman with the green eyes, and she closes the door softly behind her, hands resting behind her back against the wood, wary and waiting.

She studies him, bruised and bandaged and massive and so obviously unbelonging to that space, a caged beast licking its wounds.

 

And then she sees the boy curled up against his side, the books strewn over the covers.  
Knife is asleep with one small hand tucked under his cheek, and the stranger's arm is curved around the boy hesitantly, like it's an action his body doesn't quite remember.

 

He tries to sit and she raises her hand at him. Moves across the room to the rail of dresses and ruffles through them, looking for the one she wants. 

Light blue silk striped with black. A ruffled bodice and flowing sleeves that come down to her elbows.  
She traded a night with a caravan leader for the dress and it's one of her favourites, despite the jagged memory of that night.

 

She turns her back to the man dismissively, pulls off her cotton dress and stands there in her pale green shift, shaking out the silk before she puts it on.

When she turns back the stranger has his eyes pointedly at the ceiling, and it almost annoys her.

 

She still doesn't know what to do with this man that Marya has forced into her room to hide.  
Can't quite figure out the reason they are keeping him alive, but knowing the old woman's ways - she has to have some use in mind.  
She's never seen Marya do a single thing that wasn't calculated.

Just like Marya knew exactly which room to hide the man in; with the only woman in the place besides herself who could kill him if need be.

 

She crosses deliberately to the bed, sits on the edge and begins to brush out her long hair, glaring at him until he turns to look at her.

'What kind of man are you?' dragging the brush through her hair angrily.

 

He's confused, defensive, tilts his head at the question. 

Marya did tell her he didn't talk much:

'Articulate as a fucking stone that man...  
You won't have to worry about him talking your ear off in the night'  
The old woman cackling with twisted mirth.

 

The stranger's face is a mass of bruises and half-healed cuts. His eyes hard and mistrusting.  
His chest completely covered in bandages. The skin of his knuckles a grazed mess that can only come from fighting.  
She'd almost prefer a caravan leader in her bed. At least she'd know what the shlanger wanted.

 

She sighs. 'This is a slam house, right...?' Laying it out on the covers between them. 

'Why d'you come to a slam house if you don't want slamming...?

 

He grumbles in response, shakes his head. 

She keeps glaring at him, waiting for an answer, and at last it comes, almost under his breath:

'Most outta way place I could find that seemed to have food. Didn't wanna go into the centre'.

 

She is confused for a long moment, and then she starts to grin evilly, her green eyes shining with something he can't quite name until she starts laughing uncontrollably, shaking her head, doubling over into her lap with her shoulders shaking.

When she can breathe at last she looks up at him like he is the stupidest creature she has ever seen in her life.

 

'You just walked into town?'

And he nods, defensive, irritated with her smugness.

 

'Ah fuck.....  
The only man on the face of earth that thought he could just walk into Muirasie'.

 

He says nothing, glaring stubbornly, and she laughs lowly to herself, shaking her head.  
Stares at him for a long time until she starts brushing her hair again, dismissive. He is still looking at her in confusion, and she recites slowly, like she's explaining to a child: 

 

'No-one comes here without an invitation from the Mist Lords.  
No-one even knows about this place except those who've been through the initiation.  
Most who go through the initiation don't survive'.

 

'How you get here then?' He throws it at her, challenging.

And she twists her hair on top of her head, pins it there. Throws down the comb and stands glaring at him, vibrating with anger.

'Same way all the woman in the town got here.  
Trussed up and tossed over a camel.  
In high style, fucker. High style'. 

And she spits on the floor beside her and is gone.


	6. Chapter 6

If it was at all possible, Max would be heading out of town, supplies in hand, slipping from shadow to shadow all the way back to the piece of shit car that sits hidden in the mountains mocking him with the lure of escape.

 

Instead he is trapped in an angry woman’s room with the hot, gut-twisting wrench of shame that he is all too familiar with.

Every time he closes his eyes he's faced with one of the women in the war rig.

Toast's wary eyes as she counted the ammunition they had. 

Cheedo's hesitant shyness that didn't seem to leave her, even with the Vuvalini.

Capable sunk into herself after Nux flipped the war rig. Bleeding out whatever fragile thing her and the war-boy had made between them all the way back to the citadal.

Angharad's smile just before she slipped.

Furiosa's heart-breaking scream into the wasteland that feels seared onto the inside of his skull.

 

When the cook comes to drag him out of bed it is almost tempting to start a fight. Part of him is wanting blood and pain and oblivion.  
Anything to get rid of this feeling, to stop this ticking. Ghosts twitching in the corners of the room.

Fuck, he needs something to do with his hands.

 

Against the wall is a shelf with some kind of before-time metal clock on it. It's shaped like the front of a ruined house; intricate moulded columns entwined with strands of ivy; the hands stuck at quarter to four.

"Even a broken clock tells the time twice a day".

He can't remember whose catchphrase it was anymore. A friend? An enemy?  
It doesn't seem to matter in a world that no longer needs to tell the time.

 

He struggles over to fetch it then rummages though his stuff to find all the smaller tools he has, laying them all out on the bed within hand's reach.  
Then he spends the rest of the day taking the clock apart and putting it back together. 

When Knife comes in with food he sends him out to find oil and rags and he sets him to work beside the bed cleaning and polishing and trying hard as fuck to not get anything dirty in the angry woman's room.

They finish long after dinner. Knife's small fingers a complete revelation when it comes to fitting together the smaller, more intricate pieces.  
Max lets the boy wind the clock up with its ancient key and they grin at each other like idiots when it clicks into life. 

Knife carries it back to its shelf reverently and comes back to sit on the bed and they stare at the clock together for a long time before the boy slips out of the room, leaving Max with a glass of water and a smile. 

 

When the woman comes back he waits until she has finished bathing and gotten into bed, waits until she has blown out the lamp and there is only shadows and the vague shape and heat of her in the darkness.

"Sorry......." 

And she turns over to face him, saying nothing for a while.

"You fixed the clock...."

He grunts an assertion, waits for her to say more and when she doesn't he has the sudden thought that maybe it wasn't a good idea: if he has awoken something that brings bad memories, but then she sighs deeply, lemon and pine on her breath.

"It seems stupid to have one now, but it reminds me of my grandfather..... he had something similar.  
Didn't think it could be fixed.... thank you..."

She turns over again and Max falls asleep with a head filled with polishing rust off metal; fitting and refitting gears together.

The faintest sound of ticking across the room like a far away metal heart.


End file.
